2 Million Pirates Shanghai'd

The Escapist's news feed reports that 2 Million characters have been made in Puzzle Pirates since the launch of the game. From the article: "Three Rings' CEO Daniel James sees 2 million users as confirmation of the micro-currency model. 'We believe that this model represents the future for online entertainment. Our inspiration continues to be the Korean market, where 'free to play, pay for item' is the ubiquitous business model for online games. As the US market matures to meet Korea, we intend to keep leading the way.' In addition, the company recently released the beta version of a new game, Bang! Howdy, a multiplayer online tactical strategy game for the PC, which uses the same payment structure and online distribution model."

Comments

They forgot to mention...

[BigCheese]

...that both Puzzle Pirates and Bang! Howdy are available for the PC, Mac and Linux. I play it on Linux and it works flawlessly.

Re:Korean MMO model works well

[Cylix]

You can check out Gunbound as well. They just recently released a US server so things might be faster.

It's like an earlier version of worms, but with vehicles and items.

The catch? Money is a pain to earn, but with enough time you can get pretty much anything you want. It's unfortunately a bit slanted once you have been given some experience and go against the more well equipped players.

That said, players used to be able to earn pretty much their way through out the game without paying a dime, but last time I looked it was a bit tougher. (All depends on how much time you have or just play against your friends like me)

With all that said... you can actually purchase cash to use in the game, but I was never fond of this approach.

Characters is different from real people behind

[gmuslera]

In the game you have accounts. Each account can create as much as 3 characters in an ocean, and the game have 6 oceans (3 related to subscribed users, 3 to the ones that uses micropayment/doubloons, but you can have characters in all oceans). You must be subscribed to create a char in the testing ocean, so the amount of people/characteres there is far lower than in the other/production oceans, so for each account/real person behind, you can have 15 characters in the game.

But also, you can create (and discard later or not) any amount of accounts, sometimes enables you to get some economic (in game) advantage, sometimes gives you more possibilities, sometimes it could be used as a way of cheating, and all of this is valid specially in the oceans that use micropayments,

2 millon characters is a big number. But is pretty far from the number of real people that actually plays the game (my estimation is below 50k, maybe less than 20k even)

Re:Characters is different from real people behind

[FirienFirien]

On any single night, there's 1000 people or so online on the server that I'm on. There's 5 oceans/servers (not counting the test server); then factor that up by geography and day of the week timing. As I post, there's 3259 online, and it's the middle of the US night. Mmogchart.com puts them at 35k current subscriptions in March, so your 50k figure is probably about right; but your earlier reasoning is off. Only a tiny tiny fraction of people will have filled up 15 slots; it's largely pointless. What does complicate it is that by creating a satellite account to buy dubloons, you get shanghai points for your crew; you can then transfer the dubloons and ditch the satellite. Bonus shanghai point. That, in the dubloon/micropayment oceans, is what's boosting this figure.

Sure, 2 million characters is a flawed number; and a figure of 50k when compared to games like WoW is pretty small. It's still by far the most social game I've seen - and that with easily the largest ratio of girls to guys. I'd guess it as around 50:50, probably ± 5-10%.

Re:Misleading title

[FirienFirien]

A "Shanghai" is the game name for a new user that subscribes; there's time-unlimited free play, with the only limitation being which puzzles you're allowed to play on which day if you're unsubscribed; a crew gets a 'shanghai point' if they hire someone and convince them to subscribe, and they can then use shanghai points for cosmetic-level things which isn't accessible in other ways. It's a mild incentive for players to recruit more people to the game.

Re:Korean MMO model works well

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it's just the Maple Global server that is IE-only. For some reason it seems to be the crappiest of them all (MapleSEA [South East Asia], MapleJapan, MapleKorea) - they support Firefox and always have. In other words, try the MapleSea server http://www.maplesea.com/ for a better experience.

Re:Gold Farming on YPP

[KDR_11k]

I'm not sure how hard it would be to design a decompiler that could, say, play navy puzzles all day long and just harvest gold from duty puzzling

I'm not sure if you know what a decompiler does.